Yesterday morning I went on some errands, and while I was in one of the stores, I got my phone out to look something up, and I didn’t have a phone signal. It just said “SOS”.
I’ve had weak reception before, so I didn’t think anything of it, but when I got out to my car, I still had no phone signal. Ugh. Then at the next store, I sill didn’t have a signal. I started to feel a little panicky. I was disconnected from the digital world.
When I got home, I did connect to wifi, and I could go online, so I opened up my Verizon app, and tried to find out what was going on. I tried to open a chat, but they wouldn’t chat with me until I confirmed my identity by entering a code that they sent… to my phone… which wasn’t working. Ugh.
I decided to go to the Verizon store. There were a lot of people at the door, including some workers who were talking with them. I asked one of the workers what was going on. He said it was a nationwide outage, and that it was supposed to be addressed by 4pm, but that the estimated fix time had recently been moved back. Ugh.
I got my signal back around 5. The relief I felt was startling. I think I may care too much about my phone. Maybe I need to do one of those detox days I’ve heard people talk about…
Well, that would be unsettling, indeed. I don’t know anyone here with Verizon, so I don’t know if it hit here, too.
Since I rarely receive or make calls any more, I couldn’t honestly tell you if my cell phone was impacted yesterday or not – had no reason to look at it outside of “What time is it?” However, I can agree that being unable to call for help if it were needed would indeed be disconcerting. Glad you are part of the digital world again, even if your emotional response to this event leads you to desire a digital detox day. That can’t be a bad thing…
And mine has never said “SOS” anyway – it’ll just go dark altogether…when it sleeps…
It happened here too. We were going to take Anna to see her bestie in Chicagoland and Arron couldn’t get his gps to work. The 3 other phones in the car were working just fine so I never even considered that the issue might be with Verizon. Folks at an Apple Store were the ones to tell us it was VZW.
He was down for about an hour total.